Drag’n’drop multitasking on iPad? Readdle apps do it!

iOS 9 was a huge jump for iPads. With Split View multitasking it was possible to display two apps at one screen and with Picture-In-Picture feature you can even watch video while multitasking. But it still needs much more improvements. Propably one of the biggest issues is picking apps in Split View, but I’m mostly missing drag’n’drop feature to move files between apps. Since iOS 10 was mainly iPhone realease, I hope that iOS 11 will be focused to iPad, especially iPad Pro with Apple Pencil.

Guys from Readdle are making great apps and they now exposed something, that’s very rare on iOS platform – drag’n’drop between two apps on screen. It was done by workaround, so this is not universal feature, it only works for some Readdle products:

Documents 6

PDF Expert 6

Spark

Scanner

And of course, you need iPad with Split View capability:

iPad Pro (both sizes)

iPad Air 2

iPad (2017)

iPad mini 4

Just run two of these apps in Split View multitasking and you can copy files with finger by dragging from one app to another. Additionally, you can select more files with “Select” button and then copy them all to second app. Very clever.

This works while you are copying between sandboxes of apps, but how it works, when I want, for example, send some PDF files from PDF Expert to SFTP/Dropbox server via Documents app?

Just select your files in PDF Expert and drag them to Documents’s app left panel at desired location (SFTP/Dropbox/Any other location in left panel) and land here, as shown on screenshot below. A filesystem opens, then choose your folder to move files and confirm it:

Interesting is to use drag’n’drop with Spark, an e-mail client. While creating e-mail, just drag file with finger from Documents (or PDF Expert/Scanner) to Spark and file will be included as attachment. You can do it with multiple files at the same time: